Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

McCaulley raises the question of the church’s role as a political witness and posits that the work of justice is evangelistic and part of God’s will for ordering society in a way that glorifies God’s kingdom.

He discusses Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” his response to the eight clergy members who criticized him and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for their activism during the civil rights movement, saying that their protests were antithetical to the cause of peace (48). McCaulley frames the letter as a response not just to the clergy but also to a wider practice among white Christians of focusing on law and order and taking a moderate stance at the expense of the demands of the New Testament. Similarly, Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” indicts white Christians for perpetuating the institution of slavery while claiming to honor God and the ideal of freedom (49). Unlike white Christians who can sacrifice compatibility between orthodoxy and orthopraxy, Black Christians “have never had the luxury of separating […] faith from political action” (49). BEI offers a unique exegesis rooted in the Black experience that challenges all Christians to live up to the ideals of the just society envisioned in the Bible.